Inside LabourStart

Unions in the Netherlands and Belgium have called for a major online campaign to target IKEA, which is engaging in the practice of “social dumping”.

The campaign’s being launched to coincide with the ITF congress taking place in Sofia, Bulgaria this week.

Please spread the word.

The subject line sort of says it all.

Let’s do what we can to make this one of our larger campaigns: http://www.labourstart.org/go/swaziland

During the first five days of August, we allowed people to download all four of our Kindle titles free of charge.  The result was a total of 2,442 books downloaded in just 5 days.

Previously we’d sold somewhat more than 3,000 books over the last 20 months, so this was an 80% increase in distribution of our books.  Here they are in order of popularity — the number is copies downloaded in the last 5 days:

• Solidarity – Dan Gallin 696
• The Global Labour Movement 645
• Campaigning Online and Winning 587
• Firefox OS for Activists 514

Today I’ll be emailing everyone who I think downloaded books (based on what MailChimp has to say about clicking-through), and remind people that we’d really, really appreciate reviews on Amazon to keep sales going.

I’m convinced that using the free Kindle downloads feature is far more effective than simply saying we have some PDFs or Word documents available for download.  Kindle books are seen as real books by many people, they normally cost money, and this contributed, I think, to the excellent take-up of our offer.

I think the overall effect of this campaign is to remind people that LabourStart in addition to being a news and campaigning website, and the organizer of annual global solidarity conferences, is also a book publisher (and probably the only publisher of books exclusively for the international trade union movement).

And of course if people actually read the books, we’ll be contributing toward educating trade unionists about our campaigns, about the global labour movement in general, and more.

Mailing lists [with 200 or more subscribers]

English: 85,191 [85,258]
French: 7,917 [7,859]
German: 5,376 [5,242]
Spanish: 5,234 [5,176]
Italian: 4,098 [4,097]
Turkish: 3,450 [3,450]
Korean: 3,080 [3,081]
Norwegian: 2,839 [2,889]
Russian: 2,514 [2,525]
Dutch: 1,378 [1,369]
Chinese: 1,106 [1,105]
Finnish: 655 [655]
Polish: 640 [269]
Japanese: 483 [494]
Arabic: 451 [471]
Portuguese: 353 [353]
Indonesian: 325 [325]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Hebrew: 248 [250]
Farsi: 242 [242]

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 12,642 [12,455]
Canada English: 3,344 [3,273]
Canada French: 505 [465]
USA: 366 [344]
French: 212 [210]
Spanish: 73 [72]
German: 61 [58]
Indonesia: 56 [41]
Japanese: 23 [23]
Russian: 17 [17]
Portuguese: 7 [7]

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 8,810 [8,763]
Members of LabourStart group: 7,917 [7,796]
Like LabourStart page (French): 439 [429]
Like LabourStart page (German): 363 [355]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 137 [137]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 111 [108]

UnionBook

Members: 5,811 [5,793]

LinkedIn

LabourStart group: 1,714 [1,680]

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 781 [782]

Website

Correspondents: 731 [725]

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 36,270 [34,769]

Where they come from:

USA 8,197 [8,200]
Canada 5,712 [5,899]
UK 5,396 [4,655]
Australia 2,645 [2,313]
Germany 1,444 [1,160]
Austria 1,047 [729]
Belgium 821 [–]
Norway 793 [1,480]
Poland 754 [–]
France 741 [778]

Their operating systems:

Windows – 69.5 % [69.3%]
Mobile – 12.2% [12.6%] (iOS – 7.1% [7.5%] ; Android – 3.8% [3.8%])
Mac – 16.2% [16.1%]
Linux – 2.1% [2.1%]

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 28,820 [28,332]

Where they come from:

UK – 5,347 [4,094]
USA – 3,908 [3,628]
Canada – 3,713 [3,603]
Australia – 1,876 [1,474]
Poland — 1,608 [–]
Belgium – 1,547 [1,076]
France – 1,335 [1,081]
Germany – 1,025 [1,289]
Norway – 637 [1,081]
Ireland 584 [–]

Their operating systems:

Windows – 66.8 % [62.8%]
Mobile – 20.4% [25.2%] (iOS – 11.6% [10.5%] ; Android – 7.6% [13.2%])
Mac – 10.8% [10%]
Linux – 2% [1.9%]

In the first 24 hours of our free book giveaway on Amazon, over 1,300 copies of our books have been downloaded.

>>> Update: That number is now 2,053 books downloaded.

One result of that is that in the category Business / Economics in the Kindle Free store, all three of the top titles were ours — see this screenshot:

At the request of WAC-MAAN, we’ve launched this important new campaign today.

And what a sale it will be — for the first five days of August, we’re giving away for FREE all four LabourStart titles on the Amazon Kindle.

(Amazon only allows us 5 days for this sort of thing; I’d have preferred it run the entire month.)

I’ll need to test this tomorrow (Friday, 1 August) to make sure it works, and will then publicize it widely.

This should considerably increase the number of readers of our books and may help book sales in future.

Summer is NOT a quiet time at LabourStart …

Campaigns:

• We launched our Gaza Ceasefire campaign on 22 July; it is already our second largest active campaign.
• We launched a campaign in defense of jailed Iranian trade unionist Reza Shahabi on 10 July.
• The Ecuador campaign was closed after 3 months.
• I’ve followed up with the translators for our top 15 languages, trying to make sure that as many campaigns as possible appear in as many languages as possible.
• We did very well with the recent Turkish Georg Fischer campaign and promoted news of our victory to our list, as did with the victory at LATAM in South America.  That’s two victories this month that we contributed to.
• Using a voucher we had from Google for some free advertising, we ran ads supporting out Polish LIDL campaign; they were seen by nearly 24,000 people, but only 103 clicked on the link.

Fund-raising:

• We received a generous donation from Building and Woodworkers International (BWI) and from the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD (TUAC).
• We’ve had an offer from a well-known comrade to run a Marathon in Wales in October to raise funds for LS; more details soon.

Events:

• Our under-utilized Events module just got better — now you can tag an event not only by country, but by state/province as well. You can see the results by checking out our UK/England news page.

News:

• People noticed that visiting our home page took you to a URL that included ‘2013’. This has now been fixed and instead of ‘2013’ it says ‘news’. Most people will not have noticed.

Office:

• I’ve been given warning that we’re to be kicked out of our offices very soon. I visited possible alternatives in Finsbury Park, Bethnal Green and Muswell Hill. I’m leaning towards working from home for a few months, which will save us several thousand pounds.

Speeches:

• LS has been invited to provide a speaker for a Unifor event in Canada.  Derek will probably do it.
• Eric has also been invited by the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) to help teach a course in Germany in September.

New contacts:

• A comrade from a group in France called ReACT came to our offices for a meeting; we discussed many ways of cooperating.
• I had a long meeting in London with the Morocco-based representative of the Solidarity Center; we discussed among other things the possibility of a correspondents’ meeting in the region, maybe in Tunis.
• I followed up with all those who attended the IndustriALL communicators event last month in Italy, at which I spoke, and invited them to cooperate. Two replied, and we picked up a new correspondent in Cambodia as a result.

Books:

• I’ve been encouraging comrades to post reviews of the Dan Gallin book on Amazon; some have already done so.
• Even though book sales haven’t been amazing, for the first two months of our current financial year (June-July), book sales have made up about 10% of LabourStart’s income, though this is unlikely to continue.
• I’ve begun adding reviews to the Gallin book to our page promoting the book — so far, only two.
• I wrote to everyone who requested a review copy (PDF) and asked them to let me know when their reviews appear.
• Thanks to Matt Heaney, the book is now on sale at ver.di’s bookshop, both off- and online.
• I wrote to all 130 people who spoke at our Berlin conference reminding them that we want all their texts for our next book by the end of July.

Photo of the day:

• For those who post these photos (mostly Derek) there’s now an explanation of how to post country-specific ones. If anyone wants to do this, email me and I’ll explain how it’s done.
• The photo of the day is also now available on our mobile edition for the first time.

Enough for now … and now back to work …

Remember our campaign in support of Georg Fischer workers in Turkey?  We launched it only a little more than 3 months ago, and it got around 9,000 supporters.

As we wrote then, “Swiss-based multinational Georg Fischer has vindictively punished Lastik-Is trade union members for organizing workers at its Turkish subsidiary called Georg Fischer Hakan Plastik.”  

We ended the campaign not long ago and now IndustriALL is reporting a victory.  

Their report includes this sentence: “9,000 supporters joined the IndustriALL-LabourStart campaign to write to Georg Fischer to demand a fair collective agreement and an end to union busting of Lastik-Is, which belongs to the Turkish national centre, DISK.”  

Well done, comrades.  I’ll publicize this to our supporters in a day or two.

We’re amplifying the ITUC’s call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza with a LabourStart campaign launched today.  It’s a very short text and a very clear message, and I hope this will be a HUGE campaign with many thousands of supporters, united in our belief that the killing must stop right now.  The campaign is here: http://www.labourstart.org/go/gaza  Please spread the word.